In the last decade, there have been tremendous advances in medical devices that have greatly improved the ability to diagnose and treat patients. Ultrasounds, sonograms, echocardiograms, and angioplastigrams are just a few modern tools developed to accurately diagnose patients with coronary problems, kidney stones, tumors, and other diseases without conducting risky and expensive exploratory surgeries. These tools are especially useful because they have the capability of being more accurate than exploratory surgeries and do not pose an additional risk to patients.
Given the benefits of ultrasounds, sonograms, echocardiograms, and angioplastigrams, these tools are in widespread use in many hospitals, clinics, testing facilities, and individual doctors' offices. Many doctors primarily base their diagnosis on the results from ultrasounds, sonograms, echocardiograms, and angioplastigrams. While these tools allow doctors to make their diagnosis without costly, risky, and time consuming exploratory surgeries, an error in administering an ultrasound, sonogram, echocardiogram, and angioplastigram can lead to a wrong diagnosis. A wrong diagnosis can be catastrophic for the patient. By receiving an incorrect diagnosis, the patient can potentially fail to receive needed medical treatment and/or be unnecessarily treated. Whether needed medical treatment is withheld or unnecessary medical treatment is given due to an erroneous test result from an ultrasound, sonogram, echocardiogram, or angioplastigram, the patient unnecessarily suffers.
While ultrasounds, sonograms, echocardiograms, and angioplastigrams are extremely useful tools to diagnose ailments in patients, any of these tools administered in an imprecise manner or in a wrong location will most likely produce a wrong result. This wrong result typically leads to the wrong diagnosis. Learning proper techniques and procedures in order to produce a correct result from an ultrasound, sonogram, echocardiogram, or angioplastigram requires extensive specialized training and many years of medical training. People who possess such specialized knowledge in administering ultrasounds, sonograms, echocardiograms, and angioplastigrams are in short supply and only administer a fraction of these tests that are performed each year. Instead, technicians with limited medical knowledge and limited training typically administer these tests. By not properly administering these tests, the results are often times inaccurate and lead to the wrong diagnosis. Furthermore, the tests are typically performed and later reviewed by the doctor after the patient has left the technician's office.
In order to achieve a higher accuracy rate, close supervision by a specially trained person is needed while a technician administers any one of these tests. However, having such a specially trained person at each of these tests while they are being administered is typically impractical and would result in much higher medical costs.